Surprisingly, that’s a fairly ambiguous statement. What do I mean by ‘Python’? Do I mean Python the abstract interface? Do I mean CPython, the common Python implementation? Or do I mean something else entirely? Maybe I’m obliquely referring to Jython, or IronPython, or PyPy. Or maybe I’ve really gone off the deep end and I’m talking about RPython or RubyPython (which are very, very different things).

While the technologies mentioned above are commonly-named and commonly-referenced, some of them serve completely different purposes (or at least operate in completely different ways). In this post, I’ll start from scratch and move through the various Python implementations, concluding with a thorough introduction to PyPy, which I believe is the future of the language.